


Occam's Razor

by glitterburn (orphan_account)



Category: Formula 1 RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-28
Updated: 2010-09-28
Packaged: 2017-10-12 06:33:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/121944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/glitterburn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ayrton talks to God. Sometimes, He answers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Occam's Razor

This place is dark, but not completely.

I hesitate at the threshold, one hand still on the old varnished wood of the door as I take in the heavy silence and the solitude. Loneliness is an old friend, but these days I prefer company: it is not enough to draw me in, but when loneliness is married to the lingering trace of incense and the echo of worship, I cannot resist.

The door swings closed behind me, the noise of tongue clicking into lock nearly drowned by the sound of my footsteps across the flagstones. I look down through sheer force of habit – the churches I am used to have floors laid and overlaid with generations of gravestones and memento mori, all generic Latin and eloquent Portuguese glittered with gilt and dazzling with mosaic. Here it is different: even in the darkness I can see that the floor is plain and simple, grey-veined marble unpolished and finished only roughly. It sits well with the few chairs placed at the back of the church, and the red woollen rugs that serve as the pews for the congregation.

The shadow of incense fugs closest to the altar. I stop and stand there, feeling the weight of belief surround me; and I try it, on this attempt to step outside my own religion and to look at myself from a different perspective.

I talk to God.

A ridiculous statement, one might say; but it is the truth. I talk to Him all the time: not just the formal statements of belief during Mass, nor the brief affirmations by the bedside before sleep, but all the time. Particularly in my race-car: oh yes, most especially then.

My engineers are used to it, the steady stream of Portuguese that batters through the radio. I haven't managed to convert any of them yet. Probably I never will. Ron sits up on the pitwall and only occasionally lifts his eyebrows, I am told, at my words. I imagine he has heard it all before – but then, his grasp of my language is so negligible that he must think my litany is based on blasphemy.

It isn't.

Strange how God is held in such confusion in the pit and paddock. Alain was born as much of a Catholic as I, yet he leads the fray with smirks and pitying looks – as if faith makes one weak, as if one needs such a prop to shore up confidence.

And yet, despite the place I know I occupy in God's embrace, I am all too human, and therefore far too frail. It is the nature of mankind to always seek for more, to aim higher, stronger, faster… and then to suffer so greatly when we fail. For years I have sought, and sacrificed all for a glory beyond; but recently – ah, recently I have begun to wonder.

That has led me here, not to question my faith – which is unshakeable for all the pressure I have placed upon it – but rather to question the way in which I practice my faith.

Normally it would not be an issue. Normally I would reject any suggestion that what I am doing is wrong. Normally I would dismiss anything my team-mate said unless it concerned the set-up, the track, or championship standings. I can be incredibly ignorant when I need to be; not to mention incredibly arrogant. I have my reasons – don't we all?

But normally I have a team-mate whom I despise, or whom I can walk all over in my ignorant, arrogant way. This time he is different, so much my opposite that often I find myself sitting in the garage staring at him as if he is some kind of alien being. And he is alien – much too tall to cramp into the confines of an F1 car, much too jocular to take seriously this business that is sport and religion and obsession combined. He always turns up late for testing and practise; his interviews are meandering romps of banality flashed with occasional insight; his camp-followers are legion.

And yet, he is forgiven. Universally. The media fall over themselves to get a quote, just because he is what they like to call a 'character'. Women flock to him, even though they know they will be on their way the next morning with a wrong telephone number and a multitude of broken promises. His peers on-track hold him in affection, content to let him play the fool as long as he doesn't get too close. The team laugh with him, nudge and wink as he rolls up with minutes to spare, a glamorous beauty on his arm. Even Ron is not immune to it: little wonder, for the charmless often envy the charming while harnessing the charmed.

Only I am the unforgiving one, and I feel churlish for even thinking it.

I leave the altar and walk around one of the woollen rugs laid upon the floor. Its pattern is dense, reds and oranges and browns woven in a series of interlocking triangles. Now I am the one who feels alien as I step onto it and walk to the centre of the rug, turning once around before I sit down. A church without pews, and yet it does not negate the impact of the air around me. There is a constancy of faith that closes with me even though I am out of place. God is everywhere, and in everything.

I know this as surely as I know my own name, and so I fall to wondering if God has set me a test, just to prick me to greater endeavour. My team-mate is not a devil, nor even the weakest kind of demon; but still, he is an annoyance that I cannot ignore.

And he has the measure of me.

Only last week I had proof of this. I came back to the pits to find him waiting for me, sitting on a table chewing on a pen and swinging those ridiculously long legs back and forth. Clamped around his neck in a stranglehold were a pair of headphones, and I knew then that he'd been privy to my onboard radio transmissions. Aside from the brief comments to the team on the handling of the McLaren, which obviously I deliver in English, the rest of my cockpit dialogue is with God.

I just nodded to him, not liking the gleam in his eyes and the smile he'd reserved for me. All too often, Gerhard tries to draw me into his jokes and games - and God forgive me, but I find it tiresome and more than faintly childish, so I always extricate myself and leave. This time I had the impression that the joke was to be at my expense, so patiently I let him begin his foolishness.

He didn't surprise me with a stinkbomb or a flight of grasshoppers set loose from his race helmet. Instead he just sat there and fixed me with his gaze and said, " _O Escolhido_ …"

The Chosen One.

I glared; and he chuckled slightly, unwinding himself from the table to wander over to where I stood, and in almost perfect Portuguese he murmured, "How many people know that you refer to yourself in that way?"

"How many people know that you speak Portuguese?" I countered.

Gerhard shrugged, humility sliding off his shoulders like a loose jacket, and then he switched to English. "I don't, really. Only on special occasions."

"Such as listening to my radio!"

"Like I said. Special occasions." He smiled gently. "You're so up your own arse, Ayrton. The Chosen One? Give me a break. You're good – you're damn good – but the Messiah you ain't."

I was outraged; I was embarrassed. Neither of these states I find comfortable. I could not even take the moral high ground; technically he had nothing wrong. But I still felt cheated.

"You shouldn't have done that," I said, knowing it was feeble.

"Why not? It was interesting. I like to know how my team-mate's mind works, and what better way than to listen in when they're under pressure?"

As an argument into team psychology it was faultless. I am often accused of playing mind-games with my opponents, but this was different, because this was about me.

"You want to know me, ask me," I muttered.

"Ah." Gerhard tilted his head to one side and looked down on me. "Ask you a question. Ask you to open yourself up. Sure, I could ask – but would you answer?"

I tried hard not to put my head back even a fraction. I would not give him the satisfaction of having to look up to him. "It would depend upon the question."

Again that glint in his eyes. "Nah – you're far more interesting when you're not on your guard. If I asked you a question you'd put up ten kinds of barrier. I think I'll just keep listening in to Radio Escolhido… it's much more amusing."

"Amusing!" The word was spat from me. "You find this funny, as you find everything funny that is not meant to be funny. It is not amusing to me, and it is not amusing to God!"

Gerhard held up a hand at that. "You presume to speak on behalf of the Almighty?"

"No, of course not! I am merely saying that I -"

"You don't like being overheard, then stay quiet. Portuguese isn't that hard to understand, you know."

"I will not censor myself because of you."

"Then until you do, I'll listen in."

We looked at one another. I even backed away.

"Why must you mock me?" I asked, almost plaintive.

Gerhard folded his arms across his chest. "Because you mock yourself. It's too easy, Ayrton. And sometimes I go for the easy option."

I shook my head, disgusted. "I do not like easy options."

"I know."

And then he reached out and ruffled my hair, as if I were a ten-year old boy. Before I could properly react to this, he'd gone back to the table to collect the telemetry printout he'd been annotating, and then he began to walk towards the front of the garage. Just before he drew level with the shining white and red of the car, he turned back.

"By the way… I'm learning Portuguese because I really do want to know you. And, if truth be told, I'm kind of jealous of your relationship with God."

I blinked, not entirely sure what he meant by such an ambiguous statement. In the hope that he'd clarify it, I repeated, "Jealous?"

"Yeah. You're His Chosen One. Now _that's_ intimacy." He winked at me, then went whistling out of the garage in the direction of the pitwall, leaving me no closer to comprehension.

And so now I sit here in a church that has no similarity to my own save the fact that we worship the same God; I sit in the house that promoted schism and which followed the old way when Catholicism was born; and in sitting here in stillness and silence, I ponder on my team-mate.

I wonder if he is right in his assessment of me. I wonder if he feels threatened by me, as so many others are, or if he just finds me funny. Most of all, I wonder what he meant last week. How can a man be jealous of God? Surely it is not possible.

I sit on the rug in my own rapt communion, hearing the time swift by, waiting, waiting…

I talk to God, and sometimes He answers.


End file.
